A L S O+T O D A Y Salon exclusive: Justice Department considers investigating key Starr witness By Murray Waas FBI recommends probe of alleged payments to Whitewater accuser David Hale. Stalemate By Gary Kamiya Clinton spinners vs. White House media: A damning portrait T A B L E+T A L K Is the Republican movement that began with "Contract With America" essentially dead? Mourn or celebrate in Politics D A I L Y+Q U O T E Real men like pink R E C E N T L Y Behind the Clinton cocaine smear By Murray Waas Conservative multimillionaire funded secret investigation of Clinton's alleged drug connections (03/26/98) Mission impossible By Jeff Stein A day in the life of a U.N. arms inspector (03/25/98) Arkansas state trooper denies key part of "Troopergate" story By Murray Waas But Los Angeles Times reporter stands by his story -- denies he "put words in (trooper's) mouth" (03/24/98) Portrait of a bag man By Jonathan Broder and Murray Waas Parker Dozhier was secretly funneling money to a key Whitewater witness and running an intelligence-gathering and dirty tricks operation -- out of a bait shop (03/23/98) Still getting away with murder By Vivienne Walt The killing fields of Rwanda are in full swing once more (03/20/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		A massive journalistic breakdown The nation's media elites have gotten the Clinton "scandals" wrong from Day 1. BY MOLLIE DICKENSON | On March 5, Vernon Jordan went into Kenneth Starr's grand jury room to testify without the protection of immunity, and came out to chastise those in the press "who cast doubt on my friendship with President Clinton. "Ours is an enduring friendship based on mutual respect, trust and admiration. That was true yesterday, it is true today, and it will be true tomorrow." Jordan's statement made for long reporters' faces and short reports on the next morning's news/talk shows. It wasn't what the press wanted -- or expected -- to hear. Days before Jordan testified, the New York Times reported that Jordan was distancing himself from Clinton and wasn't about to go down with a sinking ship. "That's the way we send messages here in Washington," NBC's Tim Russert coyly, and erroneously, explained to the American people, "on the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post." The Post had also swallowed the media-invented rift between Clinton and Jordan, and repeated it again that morning. "Associates said ... that Jordan was not told Lewinsky would be a witness in the [Paula] Jones case when [Betty] Currie called him about career help." Well, no. According to Monica Lewinsky's lawyer, William Ginsburg, Lewinsky's first meeting with Jordan about a job was on Nov. 5, 1997, a full month before Jones' lawyers told the White House they might subpoena Lewinsky. Likewise, the New York Times the next day omitted the Nov. 5 Jordan-Lewinsky meeting in their tick-tock of events. Furthermore, Lewinsky had had a White House-sponsored job interview even earlier, in October, with United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson. The chattering news shows have also made much of the fact that Vernon Jordan helped Lewinsky with her job seeking, and that Lewinsky made "37 visits" back to the White House after she was no longer an intern there. They seem unable to place in context the fact that Jordan is a close friend of Monica Lewinsky's mother's fiancé, R. Peter Straus; he delivered a eulogy at Straus' wife's funeral. Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis, is also a friend of New York insurance magnate Walter Kaye, who has donated $350,000 to the Democratic party in the past five years and who recommended Lewinsky for her White House internship. Kaye is a friend of both Hillary Clinton and Betty Currie; he has contributed to Clinton's legal defense fund. It is hardly surprising that Jordan and others would take especially good care of Kaye's protégé. Wishful thinking masquerading as reporting has characterized much of the news of the alleged scandals surrounding President Clinton. Even so, the Post of late has begun to add a modicum of balance to its coverage. For the first time in its six years of Whitewater coverage, the March 2 edition ran a front-page story about Clinton's virulent enemies in Arkansas. The Times, whose coverage of Clinton has been as negative as the Post's, followed suit with a March 9 story about the weariness, exasperation and intimidation experienced by the citizens of Little Rock, Ark., who have played glum host to Kenneth Starr's overbearing investigators for six years. Days earlier, Post executive editor Leonard Downie told a gathering of news executives: "Whitewater is far different than Watergate ... And the alleged offenses are quite different. Nixon was accused of misusing government -- misusing the power the American people gave him. That may wind up being part of the allegations in this case, but it began first as an alleged sexual matter within the White House -- which raised this other different and interesting question of when one's personal conduct when you're president of the United States becomes public conduct." Downie's murky and peculiar statement bears little resemblance to his paper's Whitewater coverage. Whitewater was a 20-year-old land deal involving a former governor of Arkansas. But the Post has treated it as if it were Watergate -- unfortunately, without the great care that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought to the story under former Post executive editor Ben Bradlee. Downie also stated that the Post has committed no errors in its Lewinsky reportage so far. But the Post has repeated all of the erroneous stories from other news organizations, including the infamous semen-stained dresses that turned out not to exist and the Secret Service eyewitnesses who weren't. More important, it has indulged in omission of facts that are exonerative of the Clintons. A case in point is reporter Susan Schmidt's interview with uniformed Secret Service officer Lewis Fox. Schmidt quotes Fox as saying that in November 1997 Lewinsky spent "at least 40 minutes alone with Clinton while Fox was posted outside the Oval Office door." Significantly, Schmidt points out, "Fox is the first person to publicly say that he saw the president and Lewinsky alone together," a "critical" statement, she tells us, for Starr in his attempt "to determine whether Clinton did have a relationship with Lewinsky and then attempt to conceal it." Schmidt omitted to tell Post readers that in an earlier interview in the Washington (Pa.) Observer-Reporter, Fox said, "It would be difficult for President Clinton and Lewinsky to have had any type of sexual encounter there." Because of its many windows, the interior of the office is visible from other parts of the White House, Fox said. In addition, an attendant was usually on duty in a pantry next to the office and a security guard was posted outside the door. With security and other people constantly coming and going, Fox said, he found it difficult to imagine when the president would have had a chance to conduct an affair with another woman anywhere in the White House. "You just can't understand until you go there and see." No small omission. For four and a half years, Schmidt, Peter Baker and their editors have alleged various wrongdoing by the Clintons, partially through publishing damaging leaks about them from Starr's office. As noted in Salon in February, the Post's cozy relationship with the independent counsel may be related to then-Judge Starr's dismissal of an $11 million libel suit in 1987. Starr, of course, has assiduously cultivated many others in the media. In his new book, "Spin Cycle," Howard Kurtz reports that White House reporters "liked Starr and his prosecutors and tended to give them the benefit of the doubt." On "Inside Washington" recently, National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg said, "I consider Ken Starr to be a friend and a colleague," even as she criticized Starr's subpoenaing White House aide Sidney Blumenthal to testify about his contacts with the media. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T+P A G E+| The derisive laughter of the media elite DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH TRENHOLM